Web things that must die #3: Reflected text

I wasn’t that great of a fan of the “Web 2.0″ style trend for the reflection effect (as pioneered by Apple). Too often it’s executed poorly, and just smacks of trying to look cool without putting too much thought into the actual design. (Yes, I realise I’m quite one to talk.) I think, though, that these effects are gradually dying out, which is well and good.

So the specific gripe is when a designer actually goes to the effort of capturing text rendered on the page and creates a reflection from that, ignoring the fact different OSs and browsers have a different array of fonts, and that text is, well, text, and shouldn’t be treated as a graphic.

Life then gets far worse when you change the text but neglect to re-generate the graphic. I suppose that would be a hassle, right? I missed the boat on getting a screenshot of this, but in the earlier part of this year, the Microsoft home page was making exactly this mistake in its footer: the text itself said “2008 Microsoft”, but the reflected text put the year as 2006. They seem, now, to have noticed (after a period of at least 12 months!), and have obfuscated the reflected text so you can barely make out the lettering. Good, trailblazing move, Microsoft!

So it’s a disappointment, considering that jQuery is my most favourite of JavaScript libraries, to find this same error on the jQuery UI download page:

Especially as there’s a neat fade-to-orange effect there, which needs this image:

It’s a shame such a neat effect is spoilt by a lack of attention to detail.

Re-generating an image every time you want to change your text is a hassle you can save yourself from quite easily – just don’t reflect the text in the first place!

Now, I look forward to the day when these types of reflections can be rendered by CSS. How cool would it be if you could select the text and see the selected text in the reflection? Ersatz approximations of this, however, look ugly, are unmaintainable, and should be nixed.